My Life Outside the Ring (4 page)

Coach and the football players weren’t the only ones who hated me. The wrestlers hated me, too. Believe it or not, I wanted nothing to do with high school wrestling. Coach Mann never let me live that down, either.

Maybe it was just my bad luck, or maybe it was Coach Mann’s doing, but when I got to senior year, I got stuck in seventh-period PE class—the class with all the jocks in it. It was the end of the day, so it was basically like an early start to football practice and basketball practice and wrestling practice—all the jocks would just keep practicing after the bell rang, you know?

One day, Coach Mann brought this kid in who had graduated the year before, Steve Broadman. Steve was the wrestling champion of all champions. He was a hero to all these guys, and a heavyweight. Just to teach me a lesson, Coach Mann said to me, “Boy, get your ass over here,” and put me on the mat to wrestle Steve. This wasn’t out in the gym, it was in the locker room. I was scared. I thought for sure Mann had brought him in there to kill me, or at least hurt me real bad. So I did everything I could to end this thing fast—and wouldn’t you know it, I pinned him! I pinned Coach Mann’s number-one guy right there. With zero training, I just did it out of pure fear.

Boy, was Mann pissed. Coach threw his hat down, and he was mostly bald-headed with these weird patches of hair. He had some disease. I think it’s called alopecia. But he threw his hat down and threw his clipboard, and he was just steaming.

“All right, Bollea, try me!” Coach Mann actually got down on all fours, in position. “Get on top of me! Come on!”

So I got on him, and I hooked him right away, just pulled his arm out from under him and took his weight right with me. I chicken-winged him, and I pinned him, too! Right there in front of the whole PE class.

Everyone started laughing and hollering. Except Coach Mann.

Dude, I went runnin’ for my life! I ran right out of the building, and big Coach Mann chased me all the way down the street in front of Robinson High School. I was sure he wanted to kill me!

My parents went and talked to the principal the next day, and they let me out of PE class for the rest of the year.

So I wasn’t in with the football players or the wrestlers or any of the jocks. Not at all. I had all kinds of heat with everybody.

My Escape

Those school years were pretty tough on me, but not nearly as tough as they would’ve been if I didn’t have an outlet to take me away from it all.

That outlet was music.

We always had a piano in that tiny house of ours, and my mom was always playing. So I developed an ear for music without even trying.

For some reason, right before junior high, I suddenly got really interested in guitar, and I remember asking my parents if I could take lessons.

Even though we didn’t have much money, my parents were always real supportive of stuff like that. So they hooked me up with a teacher, and as soon as I showed some talent my dad bought me my first guitar. Not a cheap department store guitar, either. It was a Guild, and it cost like three or four hundred bucks. Looking back on it now, I have no idea how they afforded it. It was a real nice electric guitar, and I certainly got every penny’s worth out of it.

Music just made sense to me for some reason. I was always real good at math, and music was kind of like math to me. So I picked it up pretty quick, and had several guitar teachers, and before long I started playing in bands.

My very first band was called the Plastic Pleasure Palace. Very ’60s, right? We never played anywhere, but it was good practice. We had a drummer named Chet and a guitarist named Danny. Danny and I both had such big egos that neither one of us wanted to give up the guitar to play bass. So the band was just two guitars and drums. We were the greatest garage band that never got out of the garage.

Just a few months after joining up with those guys, I stepped out on my own and joined a real band, with real gigs.

Infinity’s End looked like a professional group, but we were all just a bunch of kids. (I was still in junior high!) Still, we were a pretty slick organization. The keyboard player was named Gary Barris, and his father, Bob Barris, would drive us all around in this station wagon with a trailer off the back to haul all of our equipment. Mrs. Barris used to paint peace signs and daisies on our pants with black-light paint that would glow onstage. She also made us wear socks with our penny loafers, and if we didn’t we’d get fined five dollars. It was a big deal to her for some reason.

I remember Mr. Barris was a real stiff kind of guy and took the whole thing real seriously. Whatever the gig was, we would play forty minutes, then take a twenty-minute break. We couldn’t be late; we couldn’t break too early. He kind of took some of the fun out of it with all that discipline, but the thing was, we were junior high kids and we were actually making money at this on the weekends. We played all the local rec centers and a lot of high school dances, and we’d drive up to Gainesville or wherever to play fraternity parties at colleges. We even had gigs in the clubs attached to some of the Big Daddy liquor stores down here, which was a real big deal.

I don’t remember what those gigs paid, but I do know that every once in a while we’d play a private party or some corporate gig and we’d pull in like five hundred dollars. It wasn’t much after you split it all up and took out the expenses, but it was still good money in junior high.

I guess it was right around this time when I first started to notice that my family didn’t have as much money as some other families. Even my friend Vic Pettit—his parents had a big color TV in their living room and always seemed to be getting new cars every few years. Other kids seemed to have cooler clothes or newer clothes than I ever did. They certainly had more clothes. I remember wearing the same pair of pants to school over and over. Maybe it was because I was a teenager now and hyperaware of peer acceptance, but it really started to bother me thinking that other kids would notice.

So having that extra money coming in from the band was a godsend. It allowed me to go out and buy a new shirt or a new pair of pants, to help me feel like I fit in a little better, you know? I loved having the freedom to do that with my own money instead of always having to ask my parents for something.

Don’t get the wrong impression and think I was turning into some cool rocker dude just because I was in a band playing gigs so young. It’s kind of like how I wasn’t a jock even though I could play baseball. Infinity’s End was just a bunch of nerds. We were these totally nerdy guys in our black-light pants and penny loafers doing synchronized dance moves with our guitars while we played Iron Butterfly and Steppenwolf songs. We were like a live jukebox. People loved the music. But we didn’t get any attention from young girls.

So that whole notion of “sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll” didn’t really exist for me. If we looked like hippies with our long hair, trust me—we were hippies who didn’t smoke pot. I didn’t so much as see a joint back then. I don’t even think I saw one in high school. I was oblivious to that stuff. Even with my older brother, Alan, I didn’t understand what he was into at the time. I just thought he was crazy. Years would go by before I realized what kind of drugs he was taking. I’m sure everybody else was doing it, but I didn’t know anything about drugs. I didn’t know anything about sex, either.

For the most part, I was way too nervous to make a move on a girl. A girl like Sherry Mashburn. Man oh man! I was in love with her all the way back in the sixth grade. I would ride my bike all the way to her house just to see her. She had long dark hair, like Cher, and these long legs like a pony. She was just gorgeous.

As we got into high school she started to hang out with all the cool kids, you know? She wasn’t a cheerleader because she didn’t have to be. She was more like an Angelina Jolie type. She would play harmonica before school in the mornings, and I just couldn’t take my eyes off her. She was so gorgeous. But the idea of ever asking Sherry out was just way beyond anything I could’ve handled back then.

Sue Clark was another girl who was a little more approachable, and I was crazy about her, too. I totally blew it with her, though, because I tried to kiss her one time, and I had no idea that you were supposed to open your mouth and use your tongue. It was so embarrassing. And this wasn’t in junior high or something—this was high school! I was a slow learner in that department.

In fact, not a mile away from Sue’s house there was this other girl, I can’t remember her name, but we used to sit on her couch after her parents would go to bed, and we would just kiss and make out for hours and hours. No sex. No nothing. Just kissing. When I stood up to go, I couldn’t figure out why I’d have a wet spot in my underwear. I didn’t have a clue. I didn’t know anything about masturbation, none of that shit. There wasn’t any sex ed in those days, and no one ever talked to me about it.

For some reason my friends figured it out. My buddy Ed Leslie, later known in the wrestling world as Brutus “the Barber” Beefcake, was having sex all the time—and he’s younger than me! But not Terry Bollea.

I lost my virginity so late, I’m not even gonna reveal it in this book. It’s just too embarrassing.

What can I say? I was naive. I was just too focused on other things. In those days, baseball and music were just about all I could think about.

Brother, Brother

My brother Alan, whom I shared a room with in that little house on Paul Avenue, was about eight years older than me. So he was a big kid, even a teenager, by the time I start having real memories of him. While nothing stood out much in the early years—we were like normal brothers, I guess—the thing I remember most is him putting our parents through so much crap in his teen years.

Alan was always drinking, and always fighting. It’s nothing to brag about, but he had a reputation in Port Tampa of being a crazy motherfucker. He was a big guy, like me, but he didn’t hide behind the perceived “SOG” persona like I tried to. He was a real tough guy. And while I didn’t do any drugs, Alan and his buddies were into everything.

I didn’t realize it all at the time, but what they liked to do was drop acid, get drunk, and then fight. That was their deal. Every Friday and Saturday night, that’s what they did: get drunk, drop acid, and go out looking for fights. Alan was always getting put in jail, always getting in trouble. It just drove my parents crazy. It was a nightmare for them.

At seventeen, Alan up and married this girl named Martha Alfonso, and they moved from Paul Avenue like two streets back and six blocks down to a house on the corner of Ballast Point Boulevard. They ended up having three kids, and even that didn’t slow Alan down. Only now, instead of him bringing his trouble directly to our house, Martha would come over to tell us the news: “Well, he’s not home!” “He’s drunk.” “He’s down the road and he’s in a fight and the guy’s eye got knocked out!” So we’d all go down to wherever he was, and it was always just a drunken mess with all kinds of cussin’ and blood. I mean just over and over, every weekend it was something.

It seemed to me like Alan loved the drama. Like he somehow fed off of that craziness. Like Alan needed that anger in his life to keep living.

I remember when I was about sixteen years old, he almost sucked me into it. I was at the house, and out of nowhere Alan came crashing through the front door. It looked like a movie scene. His eye was swollen shut and blood was everywhere, and he was really selling it. “Oh, my eye! Look what he did to me. You need to come with me!” I was a real big kid by then, right? So Alan tried to rope me into helping him go fight back. “This guy down here at the Trophy Room hit me in the eye with a cue stick!” he said.

Because he’s my brother, and I didn’t know any better, I hopped in the car and drove down there. The two Bollea brothers go power-walking into this bar with our chests all pumped up. I’m sixteen looking for some guy that hit my brother in the eye with a cue stick at a bar!

By the time we got there, the guy and his buddies had all taken off. Thank God. But it was stuff like that all the time.

Somehow we all just knew that it would end real bad for Alan someday.

It almost happened before I was out of high school.

One night,
I’m pulling into my parents’ driveway in this Dodge Mopar Road Runner I had at the time. It must have been near midnight. Before I even turned off the ignition someone comes pulling up in a car and starts shouting at me. “Your brother’s just been shot! Your brother’s just been shot at the MacDill Tavern!”

I couldn’t believe it. I backed the car out of the driveway and hauled ass down MacDill Avenue goin’ eighty, ninety, a hundred miles an hour. I got there within two or three minutes—and I could see all the cops standing outside. I thought that was it for my brother, you know?